Forward Thinking

In this day and age, it's not good enough to be exceptional 'in the moment'. To stay competitive, you have to have the intelligence and wisdom to think ahead. If you or your business remain stagnant, your competitors will surely outrun you sooner and later. These days, it's usually sooner than you think.

Many of you reading this blog are probably small business owners like us. We don't have the luxury to have a whole team of professionals behind us strategizing all the time. At times, we barely have enough hours in the day to finish our most immediate projects! But we must realize how important it is to set aside time to do some forward thinking, to help our businesses grow and flourish.

Last year, I attended a class by Sean Low, and two of his powerpoint slides that remained in my head until today was a slide of a gumball machine, followed by a slide with just lots of gumballs. To Sean's point with those slides, if we are constantly always deep into the gumballs counting them one by one, we are unable to pull ourselves out to see the bigger picture. In order to grow our businesses, we need to be able to see the bigger picture.

Sean inspired us to create a 'Forward Thinking' session as a part of The Academy. For this, we have invited Abby and Tait Larson of the blog that everyone knows and love, Style Me Pretty, to share with us their vision for the new decade. What do they see for the future of blogs, and what comes next after DIY? Style Me Pretty has just joined a new partnership with Google, and this is just one way that shows how Abby and Tait have the amazing wisdom and intelligence to always think forward for their business!

The second part of our Forward Thinking session will be a presentation by the two brilliant ladies behind Two Bright Lights. For those of you who are not familiar yet with Two Bright Lights, it is going to be the 'next best thing' in the wedding industry! It is an extremely powerful networking tool, and takes social networking to a new level. I really believe they are going to revolutionize the way we do one on one marketing in the wedding industry. Rosalind and Siri, the two masterminds behind this company, understands that "it’s not enough to simply be a social butterfly. You need to be smart and reach for the stars."

If you are always complaining that you never get professional images from the photographer after an event, you will love the way this software easily enables photographers to share images with the entire team that worked on the same wedding! This is just one of the many benefits and feature of this amazing product, and we will get to hear Siri and Rosalind's insight on social networking at The Academy!